Site Mobile Navigation

In Foray Into TV, Google Is to Track Ad Audiences

Google, which dominates the market for advertising on the Internet, seems to be hoping to do the same thing on television.

The company is set to announce a partnership today with the Nielsen Company, the voice of authority in measuring television audiences, that will give advertisers a more vivid and accurate snapshot than ever before of how many people are viewing commercials on a second-by-second basis, and who those people are.

At a time when digital video recorders are proliferating, advertisers are thirsty for any data they can get about who is watching their ads, who is fast-forwarding past them and where it makes the most sense to invest.

Although the initiative between Google and Nielsen will start relatively small, with ratings gleaned from set-top boxes within a single cable operator’s network, the companies say that their deal spans several years and that the relationship will grow.

“We want to bring all the advantages that we see in online advertising — like more accountability, a better sense of the audience, better tools to optimize a campaign — and bring them to television to make TV advertising more effective,” said Michael Steib, director for television ads at Google.

Since May, Google has been selling ads on the 125 national satellite channels distributed by EchoStar Communications’ DISH Network. Cable networks routinely provide distributors with a few minutes each hour for local commercials; Google is responsible for a portion of EchoStar’s local time and creates an online auction market for it.

Google then analyzes the data from set-top boxes to determine exactly which ads were watched or skipped, with a second-by-second breakdown. With Nielsen’s help, Google will begin to take that information and overlay sampling-based ratings, adding a rich demographic layer to the raw numbers that EchoStar provides.

“For 40 years, we’ve been placing advertising believing that commercials are getting the same reach that programs are getting. We now know that’s not true,” said Steven J. Farella, president and chief executive at TargetCast TCM, a media planning and buying agency in New York.

Nielsen recently introduced ratings for blocks of advertisements, and the numbers have shown that some viewers — particularly those with DVRs — turn the channel or fast-forward during commercial breaks. But those ratings take several weeks to process and do not give advertisers feedback about individual spots.

“When I’m buying for network or cable, I get an estimate of what the cost per million will be,” said Jeff Wisot, the vice president for marketing at Buy.com, a shopping Web site. “Then the ad runs, and that’s it. I get very little data back.”

But Google TV Ads — the service Google offers with EchoStar — presents more detailed data. Mr. Wisot, who has invested a third of his television advertising budget with Google, receives a report the next day listing the number of viewers who were watching an advertisement each second.

“They are able to tell me how many viewers watched each ad until the end, which is fantastic,” Mr. Wisot said. Based on the data, he buys ads on particular networks at specific times of day, a practice that he said has helped cut costs while improving the effectiveness of a campaign.

Google TV Ads is analogous to — and a complement to — the Google AdWords service that the company offers online. Both give advertisers the ability to buy, sell and deliver advertisements across many media properties (either satellite channels or Web sites) and to evaluate the reach of each ad, making adjustments as needed.

The reports from Google can pinpoint the moment when viewers most commonly changed the channel, potentially helping marketers shape the creative work on their commercials. For instance, if viewers are turning the channel after seven seconds, the agency might revisit the opening of the ad.

The information that Google and EchoStar glean from set-top boxes can tell advertisers whether a household’s TV is on, but it cannot tell them who is watching it. Demographic information about audiences is the specialty of Nielsen, which will contribute its intelligence about digital household viewership to Google TV Ads so media buyers have all the data.

“The whole promise of Google TV is about better accountability, and you need demographics and targeting to get that accountability,” said Pam Zucker, an executive vice president at the media agency MediaVest USA.

Google’s experiment with television advertising has received rave reviews from some media buyers, but its small size — the DISH Network reaches 13 million subscribers — has been a limitation. Several advertising executives predicted that it would be only a matter of time before other cable operators signed up with Google, making the measurement system offered by Google TV Ads more broadly available.

The partnership between Google and Nielsen “will push a number of companies into doing the same thing,” said Dave Morgan, founder and chairman of Tacoda, an online advertising agency that was recently acquired by AOL, part of Time Warner.

He predicted that Google would find itself with more power and influence in all forms of advertising over time. One reason is that Google executives are fearless, he said. “They’re not really worried about who they upset,” Mr. Morgan said. “They are shaking up Madison Avenue to a degree that’s extraordinary.”

Mr. Morgan said he surmised that Google’s strategy involved setting up a better way to measure audiences for ads on television and online, and then finding better ways to direct particular ads to particular viewers. He characterized the approach this way: “Don’t shake up the market first on addressability, shake it up on measurability.”

Mr. Farella of TargetCast TCM agreed. “It’s just about reach at this point,” he said. “It’s about improving the number of homes that we can get this into.”

The Google initiative is still in beta testing, meaning that a limited number of advertisers are able to participate. But Google is preparing for a general release of the service, opening it up to more advertisers.

“We see a future in which, when you sit down in front of your television set, you will see ads that are more relevant for you,” said Mr. Steib of Google. “When we make advertisements more relevant to viewers, inventory becomes more valuable and the return on investment is much higher for advertisers.”

Dave Thomas, president of media client services for Nielsen, said that discussions were under way between his company and Google to expand the partnership to the Internet and other media.

“People are trying to get a better idea of exposure to the commercials, not to rely on program audiences, which was the coin of the realm as it related to TV time,” Mr. Thomas said.

Jennifer A. Kingson contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Foray Into TV, Google Is to Track Ad Audiences. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe